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About LobbyFacts

Welcome to LobbyFacts.eu – the platform providing the essential data on lobbying in the European institutions. LobbyFacts provides handy tools to search, sort, compare and analyse official EU lobby data – from both present and past – to help journalists and researchers track lobbyists and their influence at the EU level.

Specifically, LobbyFacts.eu can help you to:

Find up-to-date information on the lobby activities of all organisations in the official EU Transparency Register

Create a history of lobbying for a particular organisation using information which is no longer publicly available on the official register website

Track the rise and fall of the biggest companies, trade associations, or lobby consultancies in terms of their lobby spend and lobbyist numbers

Find out who has held the most meetings with high-level Commission officials

Filter-out inaccurate lobby data from searches and rankings

Download searches into user-friendly data files

LobbyFacts.eu collates information from two official sources. Firstly, data is taken from the EU’s Transparency Register which is the only official source for information on organisations lobbying the EU institutions. The LobbyFacts.eu database also contains historical EU lobby data going back to February 2012 – this is no longer available anywhere else. Secondly, data on the Commission’s high-level lobby meetings (of commissioners, their cabinet members and directors-general) are extracted from the Commission’s website.

As the data on LobbyFacts is a replica of the data from the above-mentioned two official sources, it is therefore subject to all inaccuracies and flaws that may have occurred in the original sources. Please see our disclaimer.

About lobbying

At LobbyFacts, we believe that there needs to be an overhaul of the lobby transparency regime at the EU level.

Lobby transparency reveals the lobby pressures on decision-makers and can help to ensure that they listen to a variety of views when making policy; transparency can illustrate lobbying imbalances in terms of staff numbers and spending power; and it can substantially reduce unethical or unscrupulous lobbying. Lobby transparency is essential in the drive for public interest decision-making.

In particular, we demand that:

The current imperfect voluntary EU lobby register becomes legally-binding, with sanctions for those who post inaccurate data or who refuse to join; alongside more comprehensive disclosure requirements so that the register data becomes an accurate reflection of lobbying in Brussels

The Commission extends its proactive transparency regime so that all meetings held with lobbyists, including by lower level officials, are published online

Both Corporate Europe Observatory and LobbyControl are active members of the Alliance for Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulations (ALTER-EU) and the Full lobby transparency now! campaign.